Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here

Yes­ter­day on the radio they were rank­ing which was the most impor­tant moments in his­tory in which you can remem­ber what you were doing. I found the link to the quiz they were using, which was orig­i­nally put up by Slate. While I do rememebr some of the events, oth­ers seem to go by with­out notice. I wanted to com­ment on the moments that hap­pened within my life­time. At least it will give my future son an idea of what I thought about the events that we con­sider impor­tant in his­tory. This list is not in order of impor­tance, it’s just the descend­ing order in the slate list.

Berlin Wall comes tum­bling down — I can’t say I truly remem­ber the actual day the Berlin Wall fell down. It was a vague thing, some­thing that was expected for awhile that was built up over time. I could be wrong on that. The one thing I thought was kind of cool about this was the fact that at Higbee’s you could pur­chase pieces of the Berlin Wall in a sack. These days that type of action would make me immensely sad, it’s a sign of America’s need to profit off of an event. In ret­ro­spect how did we know that they were pieces of the actual wall?

Mount St. Helens Erupts — Though I was four I remem­ber this. I also remem­ber Pres­i­dent Carter on TV so I have a good young mem­ory. This was a scary thing to me. I think I had this thought that volcano’s didn’t exist any more, that they were some­thing that was from the time of dinosaurs. That it could hap­pen in real life was very scary to me. I’m sure I watched this at my grandmother’s house on her floor model con­sole TV.

Kat­rina Hits New Orleans — For Hur­ri­can Kat­rina Xie and I were at home, we were play­ing SWG and attempt­ing to get a hold of our friend that lived in New Orleans. We man­aged a day or so later to get a hold of him and post a pic­ture of his house. It was scary know­ing some­one that was going through the dis­as­ter. We almost went down to help but didn’t. The evac­u­a­tions and such were keep­ing peo­ple at bay we didn’t know when to go or what to do. We both wish we had gone, but that time has now passed. We are left with what we did do.

Mir­a­cle On Ice — Ok this hap­pened while I was alive, but I remem­ber noth­ing about it.

John Lennon Shot — This is another one of those where I was alive, but I don’t remem­ber it.

Elvis Pres­ley Dies at 42 — I def­i­nitely don’t remem­ber this one since I was only one year old.

San Fran­cisco World Series Earth­quake — If I had fol­lowed sports ever in my life I think I would have paid more atten­tion to this. I do remem­ber the earth­quake and won­dered if Cal­i­for­nia was going to fall into the Ocean. If this was the prover­bial big one. I’m influ­enced in that think­ing because of Super­man II.

Princess Diana Dies — I remem­ber this. I also wsan’t sure what the big deal was. I know one of my uncles cried because of this. To many peo­ple Diana was the last true roy­alty. This was prob­a­bly because she was the mod­ern sto­ry­book princess.

Three Mile Island Nuclear Acci­dent — Once again, I was too young and do not remem­ber this one.

Rea­gan Shot — We heard about this when I was at school. Since it was a pri­vate chris­t­ian school we all had a prayer ses­sion for the pres­i­dent. Rea­gan was like a god to me back then, the invul­ner­a­ble most pow­er­ful man. This re-affirmed that when he sur­vived, but I was on shaky ground at first. I was young and scared for the life of our pres­i­dent. To this day I still per­son­ally think he was one of four great­est pres­i­dents of the last one hun­dred years.

Shut­tle Chal­lenger Explodes — I was in school again when this hap­pened. It was a big media event with the first school teacher going up with the shut­tle. This was the event that shocked the nation. We got out of school early that day and I do remem­ber being upset. For what seemed to be weeks they showed that footage on the news.

JFK Jr. Dies in a Plane Crash — I’m not sure why this made the list. I remem­ber it, and I was sad in the abstract, but it didn’t really pull at my heart strings. Around the same time I remem­ber John Den­ver dying — I think the guy that who sang with Ker­mit the frog being gone affected me more.

Shut­tle Colum­bia Dis­in­te­grates on Re-entry — I woke up early that day and was watch­ing TV in the fam­ily room in the Ore­gon house. I was shocked and hurt when I saw this. I started cry­ing. I thought this was the worst dis­as­ter that I had wit­nessed since it would hurt human’s get­ting back to the stars which I felt was our future. I woke up Xie and told her, she didn’t under­stand why I was upset. I just was. This event truly affected me.

9/11 Attacks — I was dri­ving to work at Syman­tec on the belt­way and a radio announcer talked about plane hit­ting the trade cen­ter. I’m not sure if the sec­ond plane had hit or not at that point. I thought it was some weird joke by the disc jockey’s. It turned out it wasn’t. When I arrived at work ewe were told that if it was too much for us, then we could return home (paid). I went on with my day fol­low­ing events online. I called Grif­faw and Xie at home to turn on the TV at home to see what was hap­pen­ing. We kept in con­tact through out the day via IM. Grif­faw didn’t move form that TV for four days watch­ing every­thing as it unfolded. I’ll leave my own polit­i­cal com­ments about this time out of this post.

Asian Tsunami — We didn’t watch a lot of news at this time. I was aware of the event and read about it online, but it wasn’t an in your face major thing for me.

Dale Earn­hardt Dies at Day­tona — Really? I don’t know why this made the list. I don’t know where I was or even if I cared at all. I don’t fol­low NASCAR so some­one dying in a car crash is a risk that I was aware that dri­vers took.

There is one more I would like to do that isn’t on that list:

Kurt Cobain’s Death — I didn’t watch MTV so I wasn’t imme­di­ately informed of Kurt Cobain’s death. At this time period I didn’t even like Nirvana’s music (they are one of my favorites now). I was one of those kids the next day mock­ing the other kids that were cry­ing. I under­stand this now though. Some peo­ple may dis­agree but in a way Cobain was a Lennon for our gen­er­a­tion. A voice that spoke out and said what we were feel­ing. Some­one who we could iden­tify with. I have never had a liv­ing musi­cian that I felt that way about, but I under­stand why every­one else was upset. Wis­dom is granted with age.

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